A vast amount of video content (videos) is being produced continually virtually everywhere around the world. Additionally, videos are available from a variety of sources, such as from television stations, from home users, from websites via distribution over the Internet, from video-on-demand systems, and so on. Although some videos are labeled and categorized when they are produced or distributed, most videos are not labeled and/or categorized. Therefore, locating a desired video by labels or categories may be difficult.
A movie production company, for example, may distribute a movie which includes a title and other information about the movie, such as type of content (e.g., comedy, drama, action), author, actors, and so on. Therefore, a user desiring access to the movie may utilize a variety of techniques to locate the movie, such as by title, name of one or more of the actors, and so on. Additionally, the movie may be formatted such that a user may navigate to desired scenes in the movie. Other video sources, however, may not include the labeling and formatting that is provided in the movie as previously described. For example, an amateur home user may utilize a home video recorder to capture home movies. The home user, however, may fail to label the home movies. Therefore, if the home user wishes to locate a particular home movie from a plurality of previously recorded home movies, the home user may be faced with a difficult task of accessing and viewing each of the home movies to find the particular home movie.
Video processing techniques have been developed to enable users to manage, access, and/or review collected videos. For example, video processing techniques may be employed to divide and label scenes in a video, to retrieve a particular video of interest, and so on. Traditional video processing techniques, however, are typically designed for high quality video and do not address camera shaking and irregular motions that are encountered in low quality videos. Therefore, low quality videos, such as home videos, are not helped by traditional video processing techniques with respect to enabling home users to manage, access, and/or review collected videos.
Motion may be utilized to characterize segments of a video. By analyzing motion, the segments of the video may be characterized by the motions involved in frames making up the segments. Therefore, effective representation of motion in videos may benefit video processing techniques, such as video content analysis, video mining tasks, and video retrieval. Traditional video processing techniques, as mentioned above, do not compensate for irregular camera motions and camera shaking and therefore may provide erroneous characterization of the motions in low quality videos. Additionally, traditional video processing techniques often involve high computational complexity. Therefore, even if traditional video processing techniques were available to a home user, the home user may not have access to sufficient computational resources to process the home videos by utilizing the traditional video processing techniques.
Accordingly, there is a continuing need for camera motion analysis that addresses low quality videos.